


Consider the Following

by Phrenotobe



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternians and Humans at war AU, F/M, HSWC 2013, Homestuck Shipping World Cup, blood mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-19
Updated: 2013-09-19
Packaged: 2017-12-27 00:44:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/972308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phrenotobe/pseuds/Phrenotobe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Consider the following:<br/>There is an escape pod, X amount of distance from a habitable planet, with two escapees from a battle over territory in a star system not unlike our own.</p>
<p>Created for Round 1 of the 2013 Homestuck Shipping Olympics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Consider the Following

Consider the following.  
There is an escape pod, X amount of distance from a habitable planet, with two escapees from a battle over territory in a star system not unlike our own.  
The escape pod has an atmosphere with Y cubic millimeters of gas in release-on-demand cannisters, broken down into hydrogen, oxygen, and trace elements, and is designed to fit three humans or one troll.  
There is one troll inside, with the requisite sorpor capsules to keep them calm during reentry.  
There is also a human inside, wedged uncomfortably with their back jammed against the exit hatch, to allow for the three bolts of fabric that will just about make a decent set of civilian clothes when combined with an imperial uniform. They do not have any capsules to keep themselves calm during reentry.  
The atmosphere is eleven miles from the planet’s surface, which is seventeen kilometers, and roughly 5.50932479x10-13 Alternian fleet parsecs. Luckily enough, human parsecs are exactly the same as Alternian ones, but written the opposite way. 

If the human begins to hyperventilate, does the capsule have enough air to reach the surface?  
Show your working.

The capsule’s outer layer is burning up as it reenters the outer atmosphere, and the alien inside is catatonic and gazing vacantly into the middle distance on alternian empire-endorsed tranquilizers. The human just kind of wishes she was alert enough to talk to because then he could yell at her before he dies. The onboard speakers crackle with a harsh male voice that orders the inhabitants of the pod to “Make ready”, and the jarring, screeching, booming slam scant moments later makes Dave bite his tongue, his chin impacting on the lower end of her sternum. He tastes the copper in the back of his mouth. It's going to be a few minutes before the air seals unlock, and Dave is nose to bosom with somebody who could probably lift him over her head without really breaking a sweat.  
“Hey,” he starts, angry as hell, “It ain’t sack time, sunshine, rise and snap to!”  
Emboldened, he prods the dimple at the corner of her mouth, and snatches his hand back when her lip curls, revealing the full length of her fang on one side, settled into grey-green gums.  
“Up and at ‘em, champ, rise and then drop and give me twenty!” he continues grandly, “Snap-cagal, salute your betters-”  
It turns out that nictitating membranes run on automatic, and they flicker across those green-on-tiger-yellow eyeballs with a quiet click.  
Dave pauses mid-sentence, unnerved, and waits to see if she stirs. A long, tight minute passes before he puts out a hand to bap at her cheek, before he diverts his gaze to look down at her pockets and rifle through them. All the guilt is equalized by relief. If he can get out of the capsule before she’s awake, he’s got an even chance of escaping recapture.  
“Sorry not sorry,” he mutters to himself, pocketing her ID card, five credit notes and a coil of wire, “Raider’s rights, you grey-skinned slimy-dicked space nazi.”  
He takes a knife to the seals on the med kit welded to the upper surface too, and stuffs the gauze pads into his shirt before sliding the pill packets into the pockets on his thighs. Uppers, endorphins, and three different types of antihistamine, all in different shades of fireman’s red, or really fucking red, whichever the enemy empire is using this time. The seals on the pod finally let go with a hiss, and Dave jerks back and hits the back of his head again.  
“Son of a bitch,” he murmurs, and and rolls his shoulders again to nudge open the pod doors open. The door is still brilliantly hot to the touch, opening with a creak and a vacuum-seal pop. Over on the horizon there’s the glow of what could either be civilization, or a forest fire, or both, and the impact of their pod has created a shallow, burned-out basin to climb out of.  
“Welcome to the boonies, where we have all the magic and ever-reaching class of bumfuck nowhere.” He mutters as he lifts his head to observe the sky.  
The ruby glow of dying embers is all around him, the stumps of trees still fanned orange with the night breeze. Splintered half-burnt chitin from the spacepod’s disposable entry shell is embedded in the ground, waxy and noxious, and there’s the gruff cough of something that could be a bear or bigger coming from over to the left. He slides his knife out of the sheath again, just in case, and takes a few short steps forward, listening intently while he bends to lower his profile. Dabbing his finger to his tongue, he checks the air for the direction of the breeze.

Alert to the bumble snuff of the hunting animal, and almost beginning to relax to the night sounds around him, Dave jumps when the door of the pod clatters again, the remaining occupant now fully awake. She rises out of the shell of the pod, six foot tall if you don’t count the horns, and grabs a bolt of fabric, throwing it at where his head was, moments before he hit the dirt. She pulls a purple gun - probably standard issue, but god’s shiny golden angels know where she got it from, she didn’t have it when he patted her down.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” he mutters, still and quiet and narrating under his breath, and he times his breathing out by the chuffing of the animal, his nose in the rank ash and dust. The fabric unfurls as it rolls behind him a few metres over from his position, tacky gold thread glittering. He starts to angle himself away from the scene - it’s her neck on the line, not his, so who cares - and he starts to navigate through the fragmented underbrush with elbows and knees, belly on the ashy ground. Behind him the animal roars, and he uses the sound to cover his movement as she responds with a rattling guttural hiss. Seconds later, there’s a blinding flash of light and the thump of a heavy, falling object. He freezes again, waiting, his knife pointing upwards in his fist.  
“You can come out now,” the alien says, still standing out among the broken brush. Picking up a rock in his other palm, he hefts it before considering his options.  
“Drop the gun,” he replies, “Then we’ll talk.”  
There’s an answering clatter, and he lifts his head.  
“And hands where I can see them.”  
There’s a quiet noise from her throat as she raises both arms. 

“Oh,” he notes, once everything seems once again skewed in his favour, ”You’re leaking.”  
Dave presses the tip of the combat knife into the dip of her spine. “Nice shot, greenie.”  
“I wasn’t the one that caught you, Human,” she says pointedly, “ _You_ were the one hiding in _my_ pod.”  
He laughs at that, a dry, wry little chuckle.  
“Whatever you say, ma’am, but I’ll trust you as far as I can throw you, wounded arm or not.”  
Pulling a small flip-top item from a pocket, Dave looks down at the screen for a minute. There’s no uplink signal, no fleet communications in the mailbox waiting from the time it was locked up in storage. He’s so far out in deep space that he’s got a snowflake’s chance of meeting somebody else like him. Irritated, he snaps it shut.  
“Excuse me,” she begins with surprising politeness, clearing her throat and tipping up her chin, “I think I need medical attention.”  
“Sure you do,” he says, checking the screen again, just in case, “But you’re a big girl, I’m sure you can handle it.”  
He gives her a little prod with the knife tip, just to make sure she knows he’s paying attention.  
“You have the field dressings,” she says, “Somewhere on your person.”  
“Clever, too,” he adds. “Now how about that.”  
“How about you shut up,” she snaps, “And give me the bulgewhipping dressings?”  
He laughs, short and mirthless. “Easy now, say please.”  
“Please,” she replies.  
“Better,” he says, “Now give me the gun and take a seat.”  
She folds to the ground, picking up the gun and twisting the grip around with a quiet crunch. Bright orange liquid spills between her fingers. “Here,” she says, offering it up to him.  
“You know, nobody likes a wise guy,” Dave says, “What if I just decided to send you on your way?”  
Kanaya pulls in a hiss of a breath between her teeth.  
“What if you stop threatening me,” she says, “So I can continue to hate you platonically.”  
“Gross,” he says, ignoring the proffered weapon and pulling a sterile sealed package out of his shirt, “You’re the one that decided to wrestle a fucking bear before you shot it. Over the top or underneath?”  
She lets the gun fall back into her lap, curling her fingers.  
“What,” she says flatly.  
“Of your uniform, wetdick, do you want me to fix you or not?”  
“Don’t call me that,” she snaps, twisting with a pained grunt to grab the front of his shirt. “I’m not here to fight you.”  
“Ease up on the threads, friend,” he says, the knife appearing with a prick underneath the point of her chin.  
“I can still kill you before I bleed out,” she says, putting her other hand over his and beginning to squeeze, “Friend.”  
“Touche.”  
Her grip releases first, and she lifts her chin, “I’m not a savage,” she says, “Unlike you.”  
“I’m cleaning you up, aren’t I?” he objects, “Not mercy killing or whatever you do when you assholes lose a finger or both arms or stub your toe.”  
She rattles a quiet buzz somewhere down in her neck, like an angry bumblebee, and lifts her arm to look at her shoulder, before twisting and grabbing for the dressing. Dave hops away, raising the knife again.  
“Hey,” he says, “My med kit, my rules.”  
She sighs, and picks at the dried blood on her arm.  
“My ravaged proximal segment,” she replies, “begs to differ.”  
“Ok,” he says, “Ok, I get it, you’re not going to bite me, but one wrong move and I will serve you up on a platter to the first wild animal I see.”  
Her mouth twists, wry.  
“Deal. I pick underneath.”  
He slides the knife away with a quiet _chunk_ and comes closer as she unbuttons her jacket, keeping it folded close to herself and only exposing as much as she needs to. She’s got a grey undershirt, armless and stiff with drying blood.  
“So about this,” he says, “It needs cleaning, probably.”  
She nods. “I won’t melt,” she says, “if doused with liquid. I’m not that kind of green person.”  
His lip puckers, but he doesn’t smile. “Sure.”  
“Some of your terran movies are quite enjoyable when we manage to salvage them.”  
He hums agreement, pulling a sterile cleaning pack out of his shirt pocket, and Dave’s mouth twists into something unreadable at her quiet hiss of discomfort as he dabs over the wound.  
“It’s a classic,” he says with full certainty, “An epic of the human condition.”  
She turns her head to watch him, and fixes on his face.  
“Do they tell you that?” she says, “Or did you think it for yourself?”  
He throws the wadded-up cleaning pad to the ground.  
“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
“You will attract insects,” she notes, following the motion with a turn of her head, “And you regurgitate everything you hear.”  
Dave shakes his head.  
“No I don’t,” he says, “I think for myself. I’m a volunteer. They need me out here in the asscrack of space, fighting the-” he pauses, “Fighting. Fighting you.”  
She locks eyes with him as he puts the dressing over the wound, and he doesn’t look away.  
“They don’t need me,” she says, “I’m just a warm body to hold a gun, to serve a term and retire and raise grubs without ever seeing moonlight again. If I break they fix me, and if I die there will be thousands more.”  
She reaches towards his face as he stares her down, and touches his chin with the fingertips of one hand.  
“You and I are not unique, but we are similar.”  
He spins away, rubbing at his chin angrily to get the feel of her fingers off his skin.  
“No!” he says, “You trolls don’t care about life, you just waste and burn everything you find! Humans are different, okay, we look after each other. We care about each other! You can’t tell me that we’re anything like you!”  
She lowers her head before she stands, slipping her jacket back over her shoulder and brushing herself down with measured briskness.  
“I don’t know,” she says, “Since what I know about ordinary humans is very limited. Thank you for your medical attention,” she says, formally, inclining her upper body toward him with her arm across her chest in what is probably some kind of alien salute. “I am going back to my pod to signal for pickup by a neutral party. You may do as you wish.”  
He hunches, lifting up his hat to scratch at his head, and dropping his hand to rub at his chin to check for bristles in one smooth motion afterwards.  
“Thanks for the classy fuck-off, greenie,” he grunts, “Really makes me feel better.”  
“Kanaya,” she says, “My name is Kanaya.”  
He turns his back, drawing his knife again, listening to the creaks of insects and irregular notes of birdsong.

Kanaya settles into the pod, a roll of cloth on either side to tuck herself in, closing the door snaps and bracing the locking system as she goes about looking for a frequency that won’t land her right back where she started in the barrack ships of the forward scout-assault formation. She focuses on her heartbeat as she listens to the static between channels to ignore the still-raw bite of the wound up on her shoulder, but It feels like a long time before something blunders against the door with a bump and a scrape, and she tenses up, the cut barking a response to her movement all the way down the nerves of her arm.  
“Kanuh,” a now-familiar voice comes through the door, “Hey.”  
“What do you want,” she says, a little sharper than she means to.  
“I was thinking,” he says, and there’s another bump and a scrape, “And I have your thing.”  
She huffs a quiet sigh.  
“Can I come in?” he continues.  
“Do you have a knife?” she replies, dry.  
“Yeah,” he says, “I broke it though.”  
She considers it for a minute, without saying anything.  
“Kanuh,” he starts again, a thump on the door like the flat of a palm, “Look. No stabbing tonight.”  
“Kanaya,” she corrects him.  
“Kanaya,” he repeats. “Let me in.”  
She rolls her eyes at him, before unclipping the snaps holding it closed.  
“Am I going to regret this?” she asks.  
He opens one side of the door, letting in a drift of cold night air.  
“Maybe,” he says, and one side of his mouth jerks up like he’s trying to smile. “Look, here, you left this outside.”  
She nods, taking the roll of cloth from him as he steps in, noting how it’s been rolled back up again, and tucks it against one wall.  
“Thanks for bringing it back,” she says, “I’m afraid I don’t have any hot beverages to offer.”  
He squints for a moment, unsure, and tucks his hands into his pockets.  
“Sure, okay,” he says, “What do you even have these for, a boutique or something?” He lets out a little snicker.  
“Yes,” she says, looking at him levelly. “That was my plan.”  
“Oh.” he says, looking down and away. his mouth draws to a straight line, his brow furrowed, and he clears his throat brusquely, “So,” he begins, ”I may have been an insufferable asshole to somebody who didn’t deserve it tonight.”  
She quirks an eyebrow, keeping the rest of her face neutral, and waits.  
“It’s cold out there,” he continues, “And I figured that maybe I shouldn’t be. Cold. I thought you were going to kill me, since that’s what they say they do to everybody they find, or they say - I mean who says it? People say it and they get it from somewhere and I realized I didn’t know _where_ , and, so, I may kind of just.” He kicks his heel against the inner shell of the spacepod, letting it hang for a minute, “Totally fucked up. I’m sorry.”  
“Okay,” she says.  
“Okay?” he queries, and she nods.  
“I don’t know if humans have a different way of saying it. Like, perhaps, _You’re Welcome_ , or _Excuse Me_ or even, possibly, _Don’t Mention It_ , but it’s okay.”  
He manages a small, embarrassed smile.  
“Yeah?”  
“Yeah,” she replies.  
Dave lets out a nervous laugh, covering his mouth with a hand.  
“You got that right.”  
He reaches into his boot and pulls out his knife, still in the sheath.  
“I wasn’t lying about this,” he says, “Broke it clean in half. United Armed Forces knives are known for being legendary pieces of shit, I was expecting it to be busted when we crashed.”  
It manages to get a smile out of Kanaya, and she shakes her head at him.  
“I’ve been trying to find a way out of service since I was six sweeps old,” she offers him in return, “It’s mandatory.”  
He pulls a face, and she nods.  
“I wanted to get out before I lost a limb,” she adds, and he opens his mouth to reply, before she lifts her other sleeve to flash her forearm.  
“Realistic hand cast, isn’t it?” she adds, “I got given a rotating wrist about a sweep ago, my range of motion is seventy percent.”  
He chews on his lip.  
“I don’t think I’ll ever get a boutique or ever really manage something like it at all,” she says, stroking the cloth roll nearest to her with it, her sleeve still up and showing the coiled metal beneath, “But at least it’ll keep us a little warmer tonight.”  
Dave looks at his feet, rubbing the heel of one boot against the inner seam of his other pants leg.  
“Are we ever getting out of here?” he asks, “Not that you’re not great company or anything.”  
Kanaya shrugs.  
“I’ve checked the channels for news, and there’s a small group of cultists who have escaped the draft about three nights away, if they can land close enough after they pull into orbit.”  
She raises her eyes toward the ceiling of the pod.  
“Food will be tight, but we can make it. They’re always accepting new members.”  
“Even humans?”  
She fixes him with a steady, catlike gaze.  
“Even humans. Tell me your name, human. You’ve already got mine.”  
“Strider,” he says, “Dave Strider. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”  
“Kanaya Maryam,” she says, “The pleasure’s all mine.” 

Consider the following:  
There is an escape pod on a habitable planet, with two escapees from a battle over territory in a star system not unlike our own. The escape pod has enough food for one troll for four days. There is one troll inside, with a wry smile and three bolts of fabric in her possession.  
There is also a human inside, leaning comfortably against the door.  
The atmosphere is eleven miles from the planet’s surface, which is seventeen kilometers, and roughly 5.50932479x10-13 Alternian fleet parsecs. Luckily enough, human parsecs are exactly the same as Alternian ones, but written the opposite way. 

If the human is pacified by her presence, does this count as moirallegiance?  
Show your working.

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks go to AO3 user Signalbeam, for their thoughts about how to lick this into a way better shape than the first draft would have been.


End file.
